Paul Celan - Die fortschreitende Erschließung der Wirklichkeit beim Schreiben

Paul Celan is one of the few 20th-century authors writing in German to have achieved major significance in world literature. The essays collected in this volume document over four decades of scholarly engagement with the poet’s work by the Celan specialist Sieghild Bogumil-Notz. They cover all the periods of Celan’s creative work on the basis of a clear change of perspective in the approach to his poetry. The arrangement of the essays in the volume breaks the chronology of their original publication in order to illustrate the methodological principle of the concrete-metonymical reading developed within them. This brings Paul Celan’s innovative and distinctive poetological, theoretical and literary-historical position into clearer focus for the reader. Some of the essays take a comparative perspective, focusing on Paul Celan’s relationship with Mallarmé and with his own contemporaries Jacques Dupin and André du Bouchet, and on his work as a translator. The collection thus introduces the work of two of the most important French poets of the post-war period, little known in Germany at the time. In addition, it places Paul Celan’s poetry within the tradition of modernist and then contemporary poetry. Sieghild Bogumil-Notz has taught comparative literature, German and theatre studies at the Ruhr University in Bochum since 1975. She gained her habilitation from the Sorbonne Nouvelle-Paris III and has held temporary and visiting professorships in Germany and abroad. Her other research interests include the theory of poetry and the comparative history and poetics of German, French and Spanish poetry in the 19th and 20th centuries; contemporary theatre, especially the theatre of Heiner Müller. Her most recent books: (Ed.) Heroes Anywhere and Forever: From a German, Indian and American Perspective (2015), (Co-ed.) Erinnern für die Zukunft. Griechenland, Polen und Deutschland im Gespräch (2016).